DiRT 4 Road Book | Codemasters Blog

Hello everyone! So, cast your minds back to before Christmas. I promised you a Road Book in January, and I told you it’d be a good one. Well, they call me the post-woman, because I always deliver… So here it is: The first Road Book of 2017! And it comes with a pretty fricking awesome announcement to boot: DiRT 4 IS COMING. If you didn’t see it yesterday, you can watch the trailer we made for the announcement right here:

I'm quite hyped but there are a couple of things that worries me: The car classes (DiRT Rally cars are absent except for the Fiesta) are missing a lot of cars, which I just hope it's because we're still in the begining but the cars should transit from DiRT Rally onto 4 with the new ones so that we can finally have complete car classes (looking @ 2000s + Evo VI). Secondly, the amount of rallies. Once again, not all the DR rallies are transiting to DiRT 4 and only 5 makes it even less than DR despite the fact that you can generate unlimited stages. It's not just about the stages, it's about the Rallies variety and if we're restricted to 5 or 6 rallies only it's impossible to capture the true WRC experience via a championship because we'll never be able to simulate its calendars from January to November. And thirdly it's about the package that contains real rally stages. It would be a shame to dump all the work you had to get the real stages in DiRT Rally to replace them with random generated stages in 4. I'm up for random stages but the real ones should be in, specially in the Career mode. If there's no real stages and only random generated ones then theres always going to be a feeling that we're running on ficticious stages and it kinda cuts some of the enthusiasm. This all seems like a lot of stuff missing for a game that will be launching in about 5 months, although your team is bigger now. Other than that, spot on and good luck

You guys should try doing Q&A's like you've done with DiRT Rally in Early Access. It was really productive.

Is Vive support going to be included??????????????????? This is the decicing factor for purchase. I loved dirt rally when it would work on the vive, but Im not going to have to tinker and hack your game to make it playable. I do not have a monitor on my PC anymore, just the vive.

I'm very excited by this new game, but Alpacino said interesting stuff below. I don't know why there is only 5 rally location. Isn't it possible to add the dirt rally content in this one ? Personally, i don't care if it's tracks and graphics are the same as dirt rally, it's just to had a game with a lot of variety through a championship. Imagine: Walls, Sweden, Finland, Deutschland, Greece, Spains, Australia, and Michigan! It would be Awesome! Truly !
Nevertheless, it's sound promising, i'm happy to see the coming-out of landrush, it's a really fun experience ^^

Is Vive support going to be included??????????????????? This is the decicing factor for purchase. I loved dirt rally when it would work on the vive, but Im not going to have to tinker and hack your game to make it playable. I do not have a monitor on my PC anymore, just the vive.

Why don't you have a monitor anymore, even the desktop is difficult on the Rift which has a finer quality screen. Not having a monitor would drive me insane.

Ah man, I wanted to be more hyped for this game but for some reason I'm not. I was really looking forward to an extended content for DR or even a DR2 with at least a full calendar and 4-5 more cars. The fact they are wasting time and resources on buggies and stuff means the rally part will lose focus. To begin with, we only have 5 rallies and with generated stages only, there's no sign of real stages like in DR and there's a post where one of the devs says the career mode stages will get harder as you progress, which means they are generated with the new system instead of the real stages we had in DR. These things completely break the game for me and for many other people who loved DR. DR was a success because everything felt authentic and familiar to the WRC season reviews we see in Youtube. Real stages with real cars and real physics. They say the physics are still here, some cars seem to still be present but the fact that theres only 5 locations and one of them is Michigan which isnt even part of the WRC calendar is simply a joke. In both theory and pratice we have less rally locations than DR altogether, and 3 new (Australia, Spain and Michigan) apart from the ones imported from DR. I might be wrong (I want to be wrong!) but this isn't smelling good for us DR fans. All DR needed was more rally locations and cars and if DiRT 4 is a direct successor of DiRT 3 with this content at launch, then I'll just stick with DiRT Rally until a DR2 comes out.
When I saw DiRT Rally for the first time, it was clearly visible it was going to focus on Rally and on physics and I instantly felt like pre-ordering it. As for DiRT 4, despite we are still lacking a lot of info, the feeling isn't the same.

Ah man, I wanted to be more hyped for this game but for some reason I'm not. I was really looking forward to an extended content for DR or even a DR2 with at least a full calendar and 4-5 more cars. The fact they are wasting time and resources on buggies and stuff means the rally part will lose focus. To begin with, we only have 5 rallies and with generated stages only, there's no sign of real stages like in DR and there's a post where one of the devs says the career mode stages will get harder as you progress, which means they are generated with the new system instead of the real stages we had in DR. These things completely break the game for me and for many other people who loved DR. DR was a success because everything felt authentic and familiar to the WRC season reviews we see in Youtube. Real stages with real cars and real physics. They say the physics are still here, some cars seem to still be present but the fact that theres only 5 locations and one of them is Michigan which isnt even part of the WRC calendar is simply a joke. In both theory and pratice we have less rally locations than DR altogether, and 3 new (Australia, Spain and Michigan) apart from the ones imported from DR. I might be wrong (I want to be wrong!) but this isn't smelling good for us DR fans. All DR needed was more rally locations and cars and if DiRT 4 is a direct successor of DiRT 3 with this content at launch, then I'll just stick with DiRT Rally until a DR2 comes out.
When I saw DiRT Rally for the first time, it was clearly visible it was going to focus on Rally and on physics and I instantly felt like pre-ordering it. As for DiRT 4, despite we are still lacking a lot of info, the feeling isn't the same.

First things first, why is Michigan a joke just because its not part of the WRC calendar? Not everything is about the WRC, there are many many other good locations. 'Us DR fans', a lot of them are finding the new idea intriguing and I for one support the new system. Rallying isn't about hotlapping, yes some of the detail will be lost because they are procedurally generated but it will keep us on our toes. I don't have to listen to pacenotes anymore in DR as I know all the tracks from memory. They have made a tradeoff and a brand new innovative mechanic but people still want same old.

We needed a new system as DR physics are limited. There wont be a DR2, this is the next in the series and has developed from DR.

Ah man, I wanted to be more hyped for this game but for some reason I'm not. I was really looking forward to an extended content for DR or even a DR2 with at least a full calendar and 4-5 more cars. The fact they are wasting time and resources on buggies and stuff means the rally part will lose focus. To begin with, we only have 5 rallies and with generated stages only, there's no sign of real stages like in DR and there's a post where one of the devs says the career mode stages will get harder as you progress, which means they are generated with the new system instead of the real stages we had in DR. These things completely break the game for me and for many other people who loved DR. DR was a success because everything felt authentic and familiar to the WRC season reviews we see in Youtube. Real stages with real cars and real physics. They say the physics are still here, some cars seem to still be present but the fact that theres only 5 locations and one of them is Michigan which isnt even part of the WRC calendar is simply a joke. In both theory and pratice we have less rally locations than DR altogether, and 3 new (Australia, Spain and Michigan) apart from the ones imported from DR. I might be wrong (I want to be wrong!) but this isn't smelling good for us DR fans. All DR needed was more rally locations and cars and if DiRT 4 is a direct successor of DiRT 3 with this content at launch, then I'll just stick with DiRT Rally until a DR2 comes out.

When I saw DiRT Rally for the first time, it was clearly visible it was going to focus on Rally and on physics and I instantly felt like pre-ordering it. As for DiRT 4, despite we are still lacking a lot of info, the feeling isn't the same.

First things first, why is Michigan a joke just because its not part of the WRC calendar? Not everything is about the WRC, there are many many other good locations. 'Us DR fans', a lot of them are finding the new idea intriguing and I for one support the new system. Rallying isn't about hotlapping, yes some of the detail will be lost because they are procedurally generated but it will keep us on our toes. I don't have to listen to pacenotes anymore in DR as I know all the tracks from memory. They have made a tradeoff and a brand new innovative mechanic but people still want same old.

We needed a new system as DR physics are limited. There wont be a DR2, this is the next in the series and has developed from DR.

This is the next in the series as you said, while DiRT Rally is supposedly just a minor spin-off and DiRT 4 is the main game from the main series although it contains less rally locations with no real stages at all than DiRT Rally. I mean, there's not even Monte Carlo, so there's no need to state anything else because that fact automatically indicates DiRT 4 is targeted towards the big masses and not the rally niche. Don't forget that DiRT Rally saved a development team from getting on lay-off and it was the game that revived the interest among in the community in general for rally games, which means it was going in the right direction. All people asked was either DLCs to extend its content (either more rally locations or more cars to complete the iconic classes) or a direct sequel with the upgraded engine and upgraded features (which some are present in DiRT 4 like drive to the marshal, the podium and more cars in the track). Just look at this, DLCs are generally hated among gamer communities, but DiRT Rally was SO GOOD that people were demanding paid DLCs less than 2 months after the game was officially released.

To clarify the Michigan thing, the last time USA have been in WRC was in '88 and nobody really remembers USA/Michigan being relevant in the WRC. Not everything is about WRC because there's also ERC, but most of the rally focus is around WRC and to say otherwise is contraditory. WRC has always been the model followed by rally games since they exist and since Colin McRae Rally 1.

DiRT 4 will always be treated as a DiRT 3 successor and never as a DiRT Rally 2 because it's a completely different game, for a complete different audience despite the sim handling being present. That said, I'll gladly stick to DiRT Rally and wait for a true DiRT Rally 2 or DLC while the arcade community can have fun on a fresh game and I'm sure many others will follow.

TL;DR: Basically the DiRT Rally afficionados were being teased about something big coming up, which led everyone to think there was a big content pack coming up or a DR2 and instead it's DiRT 4 with less rally content. Great news for the grand masses who were waiting for a DiRT 3 sequel, a less of disappointment for the DiRT Rally community who were always expecting something in the last months. But the solution is easy, just keep on DiRT Rally and that's it, even knowing there will be no more cars or rallies or features added, because the game is good enough to survive a few years.

All this discussion would end instantly if the calendar was actually bigger than DR and the Your Stage was an addition to the real stages, but no - let's take what's working perfectly and remake it from scratch. They still have enough time to fix it but I doubt they will because this is the "main title" and it's 4 months away from the shelves.